The first talks have now begun at Google I/O 2016, and kicking of with augmented reality (AR) is Eitan Marder-Eppstien, Lead at the Developer Engineering Team for Project Tango discussing ‘6 Degrees of Freedom Gaming in Android with Project Tango.’

Through the talk Marder-Eppstien showcased examples on what the team had been working on, displaying a cat that moved around the stage environment, jumping on chairs and moving behind objects.

Drawing the talk to a close the developer outlined where Google sees AR technology going in the future, saying: “We believe that Project Tango technology should become ubiquitous, all devices should have the ability to understand where they are in space and to understand the geometry of their environments. One thing that we’ve done is that we’ve worked closely with our friends at the Android team to start moving some of Tango’s API’s into core Android. And so in Android N you can actually ask for this six-degrees of freedom pose of the device through Android API’s, and Android N also supports depth sensors. And over time we hope to expose more of Tango’s capabilities in this way.”

Supporting this, Marder-Eppstien announced a partnership between Google and Lenovo, where the two companies would be shipping Project Tango smartphones later this summer. Whether this is region specific or a worldwide release wasn’t revealed.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Google I/O, reporting back any further announcements.

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